"Without us, there would be no Arab spring." Thus Julian Assange, or at least an actor playing Julian Assange, or to be more accurate an actor playing an actor playing Julian Assange. If you thought WikiLeaks was complicated, welcome to WikiLeaks the play.

Stainless Steel Rat, by the award-winning Australian playwright Ron Elisha at the Seymour Centre in Sydney, is a comic polemic, a theatrical device to explore the forces marshalled for and against Assange in his pyrrhic assault on the global establishment. Outrageously funny in parts, it reflects on the human frailties that have cost Assange so much and examines whether WikiLeaks and its succession of whistleblowing scoops was a force for good or evil.

The action starts, inevitably, with a sex scene. On a darkened stage a man's vigorous thrusting is punctuated by the loud, impassioned cries of the two lovers. We can't see their faces but it's clear one is Assange. The other, a Swedish woman. It's August 2010 in Stockholm.

From the darkness, a film set emerges with lights, cameras and production props. Two actors argue about the sex scene.

"Did he really do this?" asks one. "This guy's in IT. They invented porn," replies the other. "What if the cables were a diversion?"

The action in the play takes place on a movie set. The actors play real people including Assange, various world leaders and the lawyers defending the WikiLeaks founder. It is a device that allows debate on stage about whether public information about Julian Assange is fact or fiction.

"I wrote it like that because when I finished the play [in February] there was very little in print about Julian Assange," said Melbourne-based Elisha, who is a GP by day. "Everything about him was splattered across cyberspace but it was hard to know what was true and what wasn't," he said.

One problem for Elisha and for the director, Wayne Harrison, comes when big international figures make their entrances. Dmitry Medvedev, for example, who wants to give Assange the Nobel peace prize for exposing America's secrets, comes across as an overpowering Russian oligarch figure. While it works in terms of the comedy, his character seems more like Vladimir Putin than Medvedev.

The Barack Obama character, who wants Assange locked up, is brash, simplistic and aggressive. It seems a spoof too far which ultimately dents the character's believability.

The Assange character doesn't appear on stage until an hour into the play. When he does the actor, Darren Weller, doesn't quite capture the introversion of the real Assange, but later he lights up the stage with fiery displays of temper.

Part of the appeal of the play is that it is about real people – "theatre of the moment" as Harrison calls it. It means the comedy (and there are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments) is fresh and appealing.

Elisha's pithy one-liners are delivered with brilliant timing. At one point the Assange character is in Wandsworth prison, once also home to Oscar Wilde. "This cell is reserved for people who have been careless with their genitals," his character says.

The play runs to nearly two and a half hours and probably includes too much detail of Assange's life, such as how many schools he went to and his protracted battle for custody of his son.

Assange's falling out with the Guardian and New York Times rates a brief mention but the final half hour of the production is devoted to whether WikiLeaks has been a force for good or evil.

No conclusion is reached other than that Assange believed in what he and his colleagues were doing, whatever the cost, perceived or otherwise.